We verbiage vendors get customer complaints, too. Two recent errors of mine prompted readers to write.
One reader reminded me that misusing a word damages its ability to communicate even when the intent behind the particular misuse can be discerned. "Momentarily," he pointed out, means "for a moment," not "in a moment." Not all authorities agree, but unfortunately for me, I do.
As to the "wont/won't" error, my first reaction is to say that of course I know better. But a professional writer is no more literate than his published work, and I wasn't earning my pay when I let that one get by.
Because we all use language every day, we tend to overlook misuses of language even by those who are paid to use it effectively. We need not be so generous: People who make their living by putting words together should be held to high standards, just as professional programmers are held responsible for every little bug. Having delivered my mea culpa, I intend to point out here, from time to time, some of the more awful or hilarious violations of sense and logic in the computer press.
I also plan to look at pictures: Charts, tables, and figures can lie. I'll be doing this for more than entertainment value. If you read DDJ, you sometimes get treated as an expert on things quantitative, and it can't hurt to be reminded, from time to time, of some of the misleading ways in which quantitative data can be presented.
Take Apple's latest annual report. The report opens with a bank of four bar charts, slightly three-dimensional and tilted, showing sales, earnings per share, and so forth, all zooming skyward. The scale is fair, but the tilting has the effect that increases are represented by heavy, steep bands of color and decreases by a lack of ink on the page. The drops almost have to be deduced -- you don't see them at all at first.
It's a clever trick.
Those of us who have hounded copy-protection into its present state of disrepute and declining employment should now be enjoined to exert equal effort on behalf of copyright protection for software authors.
Copy protection may have been a bad attempt to solve the problem of copyright violation, but the problem remains and grows more severe, with no solution in sight.
I don't think that educational efforts are the solution. Although there are consumers selfless enough to forego copying for the good of the author or of the software industry, in general no amount of education is going to make consumers act against their apparent financial interests. An immediate saving of several hundred dollars is a hard argument to refute. Shareware works to the extent that the vendor can convince the consumer that their relationship is something other than a vendor-consumer relationship, but when big-ticket vendors try to do the same through guilt trip advertisements and shrinkwrap licenses, the consumer is justly skeptical.
The analogy of book publishing doesn't point to a solution, because the problem hasn't been solved there, either. If books were as easy to copy as software, book buyers would make copies for their friends as casually as they copy tapes and disks.
The October 1988 issue of Appledirect, Apple's monthly magazine for developers, carries a relevant viewpoint by Lionshead Software president Chris Gillette. Gillette challenges Apple to address the problem by, for example, providing Macintosh developers with a ROM call to get the computer's serial number. This would let vendors permit unlimited copying of distribution disks, while tying disks to one machine, and is a scheme that has been used by Sun and Hewlett-Packard, as well as by Apple itself in the Lisa.
Strategic placement of the serial number check could turn a program into a crippled demo version of itself when run on an unauthorized computer, so that when users created copies for friends, they would be promoting sales. It's possible to defeat such a copyright protection scheme, but as Gillette points out, it's not the professional who's the problem, but the amateur, who copies because it's so easy.
Whether or not Gillette's proposal is a solution for copyright protection, it's deserving of discussion. Maybe it could serve as a starting point for a debate on ethical and effective means to protect software authors' rights.
Then again, it is possible that software copying is just the consumer's way of adjusting the price to an acceptable level. If that's the case, the consumer will eventually win, quality software will sell for $19.95, and casual copying will not cease, but will cease to be a concern.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's JournalCopyright Protection